Star Birth Drama Captured by Giant Radio Telescope (Photos)

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A huge radio telescope in Chile has captured dazzling new views
of a baby star lighting up an interstellar cloud with jets of gas
streaking through deep space at record-breaking speeds.

The ALMA
radio telescope, a joint project between North America,
Europe and Asia, recorded the star birth images. They show the
nascent star about 1,400 light-years from Earth unleashing
material at nearly 84,477 mph (144,000 km/h), which then crashes
into surrounding gas, causing it to glow.

These new, detailed images showed that the material is streaking
out of the star at about 40 kilometers per second (nearly 25
miles per second), which is about four times faster than any
previous observation of carbon monoxide jets, scientists said.
The discovery may help researchers understand the complex
processes stars undergo during their birth.

" The
sun is a star, so if we want to understand how our solar
system was created, we need to understand how stars are formed,"
Héctor Arce, the lead author of the study appearing in the
Astrophysical Journal on Aug. 20, said in a statement.

The new image of Herbig-Haro 46/47 (HH 46/47) produced by the
ALMA telescope, its name is short for Atacama Large
Millimeter/submillimeter Array, reveals two jets of material
streaming away from the newborn star, one of which was never
detected before.

One jet appears on the left side of the photo in pink and purple
streaming partially toward Earth, while the orange and green jet
on the right-hand-side show a jet pointed away from Earth.

"This system is similar to most isolated low mass stars during
their formation and birth," Diego Mardones, a co-author of the
study detailing the stellar findings said in a statement. "But it
is also unusual because the outflow impacts the cloud directly on
one side of the young star and escapes out of the cloud on the
other. This makes it an excellent system for studying the impact
of the stellar winds on the parent cloud from which the young
star is formed."

ALMA's
sensitive instruments took five hours to get these
results. Earlier photos taken with other telescopes did not catch
the second (orange and green) jet stream because dust surrounding
the star obscured their views.

"ALMA's exquisite sensitivity allows the detection of previously
unseen features in this source, like this very fast outflow,"
Arce said. "It also seems to be a textbook example of a simple
model where the molecular outflow is generated by a wide-angle
wind from the young star."

The $1.3 billion ALMA radio telescope is an array of 66 of
individual radio telescopes that create one of the most powerful
telescopes ever built. Each dish is up to 40 feet wide (12
meters) and can weigh 115 tons. The combined effort of the
telescopes allows scientists to see celestial sights invisible in
optical light because they are masked by gas and dust.